As the former superintendent of Greenwich, Connecticut; Plainfield, New Jersey; and Englewood, New Jersey, Leverett knew firsthand the challenges of leading for equity in communities that were, for the most part, satisfied with how things were. He also knew at a deeply personal level the sense of isolation he experienced in this work. When he left the superintendency to serve as the executive director of the Panasonic Foundation, headquartered in New Jersey, Leverett brought with him the goal of creating a network to support like-minded superintendents in their development as equity-focused leaders.

Along with Assistant Executive Director Scott Thompson, Leverett created NJNS as a unique leadership development vehicle for

New Jersey-based district leaders. In developing NJNS, Leverett and Thompson looked to existing networks of educational leaders as models. At the outset, they drew heavily on the work of the Connecticut Superintendents Network (CSN), led by Richard Elmore (2007), an organization that focuses on improving district leaders’ instructional practice. They convened focus groups of practicing superintendents and consulted with the state superintendents’ association and several New Jersey foundation leaders. They assembled a group of facilitators and documenters, which included former superintendents as well as university-based researchers, to serve as the design team for NJNS.

Finally, in December 2008, the New Jersey Network of Superintendents launched with 15 superintendents from urban, rural, and suburban districts across the state. In their first meetings, the founding members adopted the following theory of action: IF NJNS engages New Jersey superintendents in a sustained effort to build a community of practice that

• focuses on the instructional core (the interrelationship of teacher and students around content);
• involves the disciplined use of instructional rounds in a variety of school settings; and
• provides learning experiences that address the adaptive and technical challenges of system-wide improvement efforts for:
  – ALL students in ALL classrooms,
  – THEN members of the NJNS Community of Practice will have demonstrably enhanced their own expert capabilities to observe and analyze the instructional core, and they will have increased their knowledge, skills, and dispositions to apply this learning to improving educational outcomes for ALL students in ALL classrooms in their school systems. ALL MEANS ALL.
  
  

The repeated capitalization of the word “ALL” was a deliberate reminder that school improvement must focus on all students. Educational leaders must not ignore pockets of low-performing students within high-performing districts. And they must not ignore patterns of disproportionality in students’ instructional experiences, in terms of both access to high-quality instruction and academic outcomes.

Since then, NJNS has met monthly during the school year. Over 40 superintendents have participated from districts across the state. On any given year, the average number of superintendents has been 15. Some leaders joined NJNS as first-year superintendents, and one retired after 24 years as superintendent of the same district in her eighth year in NJNS. Two-thirds have been men and one-third women; two-thirds have been white, a quarter have been Black, along with three Latinx superintendents and one Asian superintendent.

The superintendents have led rural, urban, and suburban districts. Most have been traditional K–12 districts, but some have been high school only or K–8. One regional district provides alternative educational settings for court adjudicated and classified youth. Some districts have been majority minority, with over 90% Black and Latinx youth, most of whom qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. Other districts have consisted of almost equal percentages of racial groups (e.g., Black and white), and others are mostly white or white and Asian. Many have experienced changing student demographics as a result of shifts in immigration patterns and state and local housing policies. The influx of charter schools has also impacted some districts’ enrollments, attracting higher-income white students.

At NJNS’s monthly meetings, superintendents participate in a range of activities, many of which have evolved over time; these include the following:

• Developing individual and district theories of action for school improvement.
  
  
• Analyzing district-level data to identify systemic inequities and developing strategies to address them.
  
  
• Presenting equity goals and receiving critical feedback on these from peers.
  
  
• Learning from experienced equity-focused leaders who are current or former district leaders.
  
  
• Taking part in explicit discussions about race and instruction, culture, and leadership.
  
  
• Hosting and participating in instructional rounds and equity visits.  
  
  

While NJNS meetings initially included only superintendents and design team members, over time the community of practice regularly involves members of superintendents’ leadership teams.

A core component of NJNS’s early history focused on the use of instructional rounds to develop shared understandings of effective teaching and learning. Instructional rounds, explained in detail in City and colleagues’ (2009) Instructional Rounds in Education, is a school observation protocol aimed at developing participants’ collective understanding of instructional practice. Instructional rounds within NJNS involved groups of superintendents and design team members visiting a number of different classrooms within a school, focused by a specific problem of practice identified by the host superintendent and principal. Each year, for the first several years of NJNS’s history, three to five member superintendents hosted daylong instructional rounds within one of their district schools. In time, instructional rounds would evolve to become the equity visits that are at the heart of the current work of NJNS.